The present invention relates generally to an environment of performance comparison of a problem solving system that can use two or more optimization techniques.
Contrary to a standard optimization technique where no result is available until the ending of an optimization method, an anytime technique can be stopped at any time to provide a solution of increasing quality over time. An anytime technique is expected to find better solutions the longer it executes. A constraint programming optimization engine uses an anytime technique to find optimal solutions to combinatorial problems (also known as models) expressed in a mathematical language. A problem is expressed as a model that specifies three pieces of information: the unknowns of the problem (variables in the model); the constraints/laws/rules of the problem (constraints between variables in the model); and what is to be optimized (the objective function in the model).